Quizlet

Quizlet is a site for making digital flashcards.  Quizlet allows educators and students to create study sets of interactive flashcards, which can include images and sound.  While free accounts are available, paid accounts to Quizlet Plus include access to extra features such as the ability to upload your own images and to make flashcard sets for an unlimited amount of classes as opposed to the 8 which are included with a free Quizlet account. 

I created a set of cards as a quick reference guide to students on the characters for a 10th grade English class studying Shakespeare's Othello.  When students study Shakespeare, they can easily confuse characters and their actions, simply because the language is both complex and often times intentionally clever and subversive.  Until students become accustomed with reading Shakespeare, they may need guides to the action of the play.  Furthermore, since Othello is a play, it is truly intended to be heard and seen, not read.  Therefore, Quizlet offers a unique tool with which to aid students in their study of Shakespearean plays.

As an online tool, Quizlet is very easy to use.  You simply name your set and begin typing information into the appropriate fields provided.  You can easily tab down to the next row of text boxes in order to write another flashcard.  In addition to typing text onto each of the flashcards, you must also set your specific language, which allows the cards to have an audio feature, in which the information on the card can be read aloud to the student.  This feature may be particularly useful for foreign language teachers but also serves audio learners very well.

Quizlet also has a feature that allows you to add images to the flashcards.  This feature is extremely useful for students of plays.  If I were to show a film adaptation of Othello to the class, I could include stills from the film of each of the actors with the corresponding characters they are portraying.  In the free account of Quizlet, I found that there were plenty of stock images of Othello although they were shots from a live adaptation and the actors were unfamiliar to me.  However, if I had Quizlet Plus, I could save stills from any movie I chose to show my class, and incorporate them into my flashcard set.  I found this feature, in particular, to be one of the most useful additions to my lesson on Othello.

Another feature of Quizlet is that you can search for flashcard sets on almost any subject.  Therefore, as long as the flashcard set is open to the public, I can use it as a study aid in my class.  Furthermore, students who need help in a particular subject may also find Quizlet an excellent resource for their independent study.  Because users have the option to set the privacy level on their own flashcard set, I can create a set specifically for my students and give them a password to view the card set.  In this case, I did set the password of "Othello" for these flashcards I created.  I can also designate my sets by class, allowing me to organize my cards by subject, unit, and lesson easily.

http://quizlet.com/15518902/othello-characters-flash-cards/